If you’ve ever visited Iceland, you probably recognize it as a place of incredible scenic beauty and remarkable extremes. That is, it’s friggin’ cold up there. Not all the time, and perhaps not in the same way it was when my wife and I visited there 12 years ago for vacation (because of climate change), but still. Of course, one always grows acclimated to the environment in which one was raised. So first things first: credit writer-director Thordur Palsson, born and raised in the country, for succeeding in making his country look and feel strange and foreboding, as it needs to be for the newcomers who populate his narrative in “The Damned,” an insinuating horror picture set in the 19th century.
At the film’s beginning, a female narrator recalls the idea of Iceland as “a place of opportunity … if you could endure the cold … the long nights … the hunger.” Cinematographer Eli Arenson’s camera stacks blue sky on top of shiny white ice—the only ground one can see—in early shots, making you feel those things that might be endured. The feel, from the very start, is of a scary story told at a fireside—a fireside one hopes stays stoked because the chilling alternative fills one with dread.
Odessa Young plays Eva, who oversees a fishing station that was once the province of her late husband Magnus. This isn’t considered a job for a woman, but her community has bigger challenges than that, including a scarcity of food. Hence, the sight of a shipwreck at some distance from the community’s desolate shore engenders an unusual emotion: resentment. “What were they doing this far north?” one observer muses aloud. “We can barely feed ourselves,” another grouses almost immediately. Hence: no rescue party is formed. No aid is dispatched.
And Eva is all right, nominally, with this decision. Which literally comes to haunt her. A more conventional horror picture would have the souls of the abandoned ship’s inhabitants walking the earth and targeting the community, but something more insidious happens. Unfathomable accidents. An unforeseen bounty. And the fishing station’s inhabitants inexplicably turning against each other, tasting, and imparting, madness all around. A particularly beefy fisherman goes nuts and hectors Eva and others: “You think you’re safe?”
The tension is underscored by composer Stephen McKeon’s high-pitched strings, recalling the Penderecki music Kubrick grafted to horror imagery to memorable effect in “The Shining.” The entire cast, including British “Peaky Blinders” star Joe Cole, hangs in throughout the nerve-wracking proceedings in appropriately downcast modes. By the finale, in which the fire that Eva was told was necessary to break the curse of the dead materializes, it’s in the service of a genuinely gasp-inducing twist. Speaking of breaking curses, the first movies of any given year are usually among the worst. Not this one. It’s a keeper, so treat yourself to a scary New Year’s celebration.
